Desiccated goat, rat, and turkey; steel, rope, carpet, peach basket, wood, tire scraps, plastic toys, shoes, motor-oil bottle, wire fencing, chains, ironing board, farm and construction tools, wire, paintbrushes, enamel, spray paint, and Splash Zone compound. While this list could understandably be mistaken for items encountered by John McPhee on one of his epic road trips, they are, in fact, the materials (along with canvas) that comprise an assemblage by Thornton Dial entitled Lost Farm (Billy Goat Hill), created in 2000 [below, left]. This painting, which was in a major 2012 show at the High Museum bears a close relationship to works on paper that will open next week at Ricco Maresca Gallery, in Chelsea, which began showing Dial’s work 35 years ago. 

The gallery’s press release says this about the artist: While Dial’s paintings and assemblages often grapple with the long shadow of American history—racial violence, systemic oppression, the struggle for black liberation—his drawings turn inward, mapping the terrain of desire, fear, memory, and the shifting contours of identity. Yet in Dial’s world, the personal and historical are inseparable.

Thorton Dial [1928-2016] emerged from obscurity during the mid-1990’s, when the gallery presented the first show of his work in New York, and was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. His work has since entered the collections of such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Even in these intimate works on paper, history hums beneath the surface: faces materialize and dissolve like ancestral echoes, while figures gather into spectral crowds, at once haunted and haunting. The interior becomes a stage where memory and myth intersect with the lived realities that shaped his life and vision. Their lines do not merely outline form; they breathe. They grapple. They remember. Each drawing is a compact, poetic testament to an artist who refused to be silenced—who trusted his hand, his instinct, and his truth.

Dial was born in 1928 in rural Alabama, where he worked in the fields as soon as he could walk and carry things. He worked for most of his adult life as a welder for the Pullman railroad car company. But he always made things and gradually became adept in the media of painting, drawing, sculpture, and watercolor.

Thorton Dial's art is prized for its originality, its emotional impact and its acute commentary on the experience of an African-American from the South whose lifetime encompasses the brutal Jim Crow years and the burgeoning civil-rights movement. Although he could not read or write, and never had formal schooling of any kind, his working methods place him soundly within mainstream art practices of the late 20th century, such as appropriation, de-materialization and fetishism.

Save the date: Thursday, June 12, 6-8 pm. Ricco Maresca Gallery, 529 West 20^th Street, FL3, New York, NY Info